Giant Electromagnet Moves to Permanent Home at Fermilab

A giant but delicate electromagnet has finally moved into its custom-made home in Illinois, a year after completing a cautious voyage from New York over land and sea.

Last week, the 50-foot-wide (15 meters) centerpiece of the Muon g-2 particle physics experiment was transferred to a new building at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.

Once housed at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island, the ring-shaped electromagnet made its $3-million move to Batavia last summer. It traveled most of the 3,200-mile (5,000 kilometers) journey by barge, cruising down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi River. After the electromagnet arrived in port in Lemont, Illinois, a police-escorted caravan brought the strange cargo to Fermilab. It arrived on July 26, 2013.

But Fermilab officials had to wait another year to put the electromagnet in its permanent home while construction work was underway on a new building to house the experiment. Over last week, the ring was finally moved across the Fermilab campus and slowly pulled into place on huge metal tracks in the newly finished building.

When the Muon g-2 experiment begins in 2017, the giant electromagnet will be used to capture and store muons, rare subatomic particles that Fermilab describes as "heavy cousins of electrons."

Previous experiments at Brookhaven suggested, but didn't prove, that muons do not "wobble" as predicted by the Standard Model (the reigning theory of particle physics) when placed in a magnetic field. Physicists hope to get to the bottom of this discrepancy at Fermilab, which is home to an accelerator complex that can generate a more intense and pure beam of muons than Brookhaven's machines. They expect they might find new particles or hidden subatomic forces.